HMW share the well?
Come and see this poster:
It displays the norms by which we, at The Mount Vernon School, mean to inquire, explore, question, wonder, what-if, show, revise, avoid, reimagine, and ultimately share the learning life.
These posters grace almost every single classroom in our middle school building, mine included. And I thought that “Sharing the Well” was something I already knew all about.
On some days, “Share the Well” reminds of cross country workouts in high school and college, after the breezy banter of the first interval gives way to a quieter, fiercer urgency of feet against grass, of managing tempo and pace and breath alongside teammates who each take a turn at the lead, leaning like you into each uphill for the same race-day dream.
On other days, “Share the Well” conjures that day when Jesus (as the Gospel of John tells it) scandalized his disciple friends not only by pulling up at a public watering hole in the wrong neighborhood and acknowledged the existence of a Samaritan woman there, but again by asking her for a drink from the well.
Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri), Oil on Canvas, ca. 1650.
By now, the disciples might have expected their teacher to test and transgress every social, political, and religious law of their day from here to Jerusalem. He loved connecting with people on the margins to make a point. But who could have predicted that this spontaneous moment of generosity and connection that recognizes the parched roads we’ve all known would send that Samaritan woman running back to her neighbors, shrieking with delight to “come and see” - echoing the same words Jesus had used to call them?
Perhaps my seventh grade Humanities students from last year knew, at some level, that “sharing the well” with one another was a more subversive and life-changing and dangerous norm for classroom learning than, say, “having fun”. Maybe they knew (without knowing?) that collaboration and interdependence is indeed a slower, more tedious, more time-consuming way through school than most high-achievers typically plan for themselves.
Not a single one of them chose this Mount Vernon norm as their favorite. Interestingly, none of them chose it as their least favorite, either. They just passed it by on the other side, intent upon other disciple business…..
They wanted nothing to do with it.
How come?
Who taught them that?
Imagine my surprise to find out recently that… maybe it was me.
These first three weeks of the school year have found Ryan, Todd and I dreaming, researching, devising, revising, sharing, reframing, and re-designing our curricular calendar. We are finding our way into daily check-ins, all-hours text threads, and rich conversations with a growing circle of colleagues at school (including some amazing folks outside of Mount Vernon). We compare conversations and interactions with students. We’ve slowed the pace of our curricular planning to place those interactions and questions at the center of what we might try to make of tomorrow’s class.
For one of the first times in my teaching life (I’m in my third year at Mount Vernon, and my sixteenth year overall), I think I am “Sharing the Well” of my daily teaching practice. And on many days, I’ve felt a strong urge to protect the unfinished map that is our first Post-It calendar.
We started curating questions and ideas and doodles and color-coded due dates on it last spring, as worn out as we already were from the closing year. I was thrilled to see what we were building together. Was this something of the disciples’ thrilling, crazy decision to leave everything and follow a subversive dream? Were we edging around some primal hearth of radical collaboration that is baked into design thinking (and especially in Liberatory Design, that well for goodness and justice to which I mean to return, again and again)?
I hoped so. And when we parted ways for the summer, this calendar became a map towards a new horizon of learning and living together with our students that we’d wander into together. As our map.
Soon enough, my enthusiasm and urgency for a new journey found easy expression in older habits. My daily habits around summer learning and summer planning (see also Tema Okun’s new essay on what white supremacy culture can look like) threatened to turn our map into the training calendar of a fierce and mediocre cross country runner who learned and taught like someone still chasing those old races he couldn’t win.
Into my training plan.
Co-creating our Impact Design Lab class is precisely what I feel called to do as an educator, learner, and would-be disciple. I’m sure of that. But I’m coming to understand how this experience of “Sharing the Well” is (w)hol(l)y different from the rosy memories of leading workouts a few decades ago, or inserting myself favorably in John’s gospel story without a closer look at the historical context or my own daily ways of quenching my own thirst.
Making and sharing space with Todd and Ryan around our students’ brave questions has opened me to going thirsty. We are practicing what feels to me like a subversively slower way of relating and reflecting. It is humbling and exciting and terrifying to take real steps into a vision of what could (and should) be, and away from the familiar parch of isolation and exhaustion that we – that I – all too easily narrate as my “thirsting for righteousness” rather than naming my ways of whiteness for what they are.
As I write this, I must admit that a life-long project of isolation, perfectionism, workaholism, and undiagnosed ADHD (until last spring) has kept me from ever really experiencing what it could mean to “Share the Well” at school.
But I’m learning now, in spite of myself. As embarrassing as it is to write that out loud, I also know I’m in real danger of becoming more of the person I’d like the world to already see in me. And it’s in that spirit that I leave you with a quote from Audrey Lorde - and with new questions about “Sharing the Well” from which I am starting again this morning:
“The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered representations of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are the result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
If we mean to design for “impact” in our teaching and learning practice, do we start by designing better irrigation systems, or amplifying the right amount (and kind) of thirst?
In those moments when teachers like me finally manage to “Share the Well” in their classrooms, are we planting seeds for the demise of school as we currently know it? Or only of ourselves as the teachers we thought we were supposed to be?
Let’s come and see.
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